Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telco by subscriber base has announced that it’s the reverse call request service will no longer be a free service to avoid misuse and allocate resources to better use.
The reverse call feature was introduced in June 2019 to allow subscribers to transfer the cost of a call to the recipient by adding the ‘#’ symbol before dialing the number. The reverse call service was an extension of its SMS service dubbed “Please Call Me”
According to the firm’s updated terms of service, “This service will be free to the initiator of the reverse call for up to two requests in a day. Subsequent reverse call requests made within the day (after the first two requests) will be charged an access fee of Ksh. 0.5 per reverse call request.”
By limiting the service to only 2 free requests a day and charging a fee of Sh0.5 per any extra reverse call request, the firm aims to curb unnecessary usage and reduce its dependency and annoyance especially by customers who want to misuse the service. By charging for reverse call requests, Safaricom will also make an extra shilling for the extra requests beyond the second one.
Safaricom says it has served over 130 million reverse call requests since the launch of the service to complement other similar services such as Please Call Me, a free SMS service and Okoa Jahazi, an airtime advance service.